A string of spring city breaks in the US and Canada? Here’s how I did it

The sun was blazing as we pedalled along the Lachine Canal in Montreal and we had to stop to peel off layers in the May heat. “Spring only lasts four weeks or so here and we all go a little crazy,” said Marie-Hélène Lemay, our guide. Daffodils, tulips and magnolias were in full bloom. A groundhog scuttled across the path in front of us. Red-winged blackbirds strutted about, attracted by the crumbly ginger biscuits Lemay was dishing out as a treat.

The bike ride (£115pp), one of the shore excursions on my cruise from Montreal to New York City aboard the 930-passenger Viking Neptune, did not go entirely as planned. Inevitably someone asked for a loo break the minute we set off, so we made a diversion to the Marché Atwater, a fabulous farmers’ market in front of a striking 1930s art deco building. This unscheduled stop turned out to be a bonus as we drooled over displays of cheeses, bunches of fresh asparagus and gourmet chocolate stalls.

Later, as we were speeding around the leafy Île Notre-Dame, which lies in the middle of the vast St Lawrence River, a man casually announced that he had lost his wife — she didn’t have a phone. She was duly found beside a duck pond. I did not care about the detours, though. This was my first visit to Montreal and the other Canadian ports on our itinerary — Quebec City, Saguenay and Halifax — and I was ready for experiences.

The tour only got better. “You know the Leonard Cohen song Suzanne?” Lemay asked as we stopped outside the waterfront chapel of Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours, known as the sailors’ church. “This is the church he was writing about.”

I remembered the line “And the sun pours down like honey on our lady of the harbour”, which referred to the statue of the Virgin Mary on top of the chapel. Cohen heritage tours: another reason to explore Montreal, his home town, in more depth.

Back on board, my husband, David, and I soothed our muscles in Viking Neptune’s spa, wallowing in the warm bubble pool and flopping between the ice cave and the steam room. At 6pm Captain Vincent van Zijderveld edged the ship away from the dock and we had a celebratory martini in the Explorer’s Lounge, where the resident crooner, James, was playing Cat Stevens songs on the piano.

The almost impossibly wide St Lawrence River stretched out before us, threaded with sandbars, the banks lined with fir trees. Behind them oil refineries and giant silos gave way to an infinity of forest. The river is a vital transport artery connecting the Great Lakes to the Atlantic, the cargo ships chugging up and down laden with everything from timber to agricultural machinery.

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Spring, however, did not last four weeks — it was more like a day. We shivered our way around the stone houses and cobbled lanes of Quebec City’s Petit Champlain district on a walking tour — an included excursion — in a temperature of 8C and a biting wind, the turreted Château Frontenac hotel above us austere against the iron-grey sky.

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Beyond Quebec City, the St Lawrence broadens as it nears its vast estuary. Viking Neptune took a side trip along the skinny Saguenay Fjord and docked at La Baie, a little port hunkering down in a place that seemed just to be emerging from an intense winter. Twelve feet of snow on the coast is normal, with 25ft in the surrounding mountains, which were still splotched with white.

There’s not a lot to do in La Baie: it’s one of three boroughs that make up the logging town of Saguenay and I could see that in warmer weather the hiking and kayaking would be fantastic. However, the briny smell in the air as the tide retreated to leave acres of gleaming sands was invigorating. The rather bleak setting was jollied up too by locals singing sea shanties on the dock and dishing out maple taffy, a deliciously intense toffee-like sweet made by pouring molten maple syrup onto ice and twirling it round a stick.

Sadly, gale force 8 winds and huge swells meant that the whale-watching trip from Gaspé I’d set my heart on was cancelled. We could not even get into the port so headed straight for our next stop, Halifax, Nova Scotia. Viking Neptune cut smoothly through the waves, spindrift gusting across the grey water. David and I braced ourselves against the wind on the Promenade Deck, wallowed in the soothing spa and hunkered down with tea and apple cake — a recipe handed down through generations of Viking’s Norwegian owners, the Hagens — in the warmth of the Explorer’s Lounge.

A reflection of its ownership, the ship’s decor is pure hygge at sea, with flickering vapour fires and squashy sofas draped with reindeer skins and Nordic blankets. There are four places to eat in the evenings. The Italian-themed Manfredi’s was our favourite: roast halibut on a bed of green lentils for me and ribeye with peppercorn sauce for David. The crab cakes at the Chef’s Table were a close contender, as was the Norwegian poached salmon in the Restaurant.

Beyond long, relaxed dinners, we went to a few shows in the theatre. Standouts were a performance by Amy Hayes, the ship’s assistant cruise director, who has a wonderfully mellow voice, and a superb evening of opera classics by the Cuban-American tenor Brian Rodriguez. We skipped the Shania Twain night.

Spring, mercifully, was back in full swing as we docked in the heart of Halifax. The 18th-century clapboard houses and buzzing waterfront boardwalk were bathed in hot sunshine, with locals relaxing in brightly coloured Adirondack chairs. I was instantly enchanted. The hop-on, hop-off tour bus (another included excursion) turned out to be an old London Routemaster — a No 52, to be precise — ferrying us to the star-shaped Fort George, built in 1856, and later dropping us off at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic.

For a ship nerd like me this was pure heaven. We learnt about the role played by Halifax in both world wars, and the great explosion of 1917, in which 1,950 people died after two ships — one carrying highly explosive munitions — collided. There are sections on the age of steam, wooden sailing boats and the story of the indigenous Mi’kmaq people, who have lived in what is now Nova Scotia for more than 10,000 years.

Then there is the Titanic story: Halifax had the miserable job of retrieving and receiving the dead, its salvage ships recovering 337 bodies, many of which were brought back to the city for burial. Bits of the wreck were saved too: pieces of wood, a fragment of a deckchair. It was all too real. I could barely look at a pair of leather children’s shoes that the rescuers could not bring themselves to dispose of.

We joined a tour to Peggy’s Cove (£84pp), driving across a landscape of spruce and silver birch trees fringing mirror-calm lakes that reflected the endless cobalt sky. Peggy’s Cove is one of those places that is even better than it appears in photos, huddled on glacier-carved granite rocks and guarded by a white lighthouse. Piles of lobster pots were scattered prettily around, with boats bobbing in the harbour, and I scrambled over the rocks to snap the money shot of the lighthouse against the sparkling sea.

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Processing 900 passengers and almost as many crew for entry into the US as we approached Boston was inevitably a hefty task, Viking’s friendly crew handing out refreshments to the good-natured but slow-moving queues. Happy to be on dry land, David and I booked a Duck tour (£76pp) on an amphibious vehicle that made a fast-paced and frothy dash through the complex history of the city, passing Boston Common, ritzy Beacon Hill and the downtown area before trundling down a ramp and sploshing into the Charles River, to the surprise of some geese.

I should not have been shocked by the prices in Boston — everything was more expensive once we had crossed the border — but I was. I don’t eat lobster but if I did, £29 for a lobster roll — essentially a posh sandwich — in Quincy Market would have put me right off. We wandered instead through Little Italy, the mouthwatering aroma of garlic and pizza in the air, and snacked on hot spinach and cheese arancini from Monica’s Mercato.

Emotions were heightened as we sailed into Manhattan in brilliant sunshine, the conclusion of our voyage. Everybody, including the crew, from off-duty waiters to cabin stewards, gathered on deck as the shimmering skyscrapers grew closer. I wondered what their hopes and dreams were as we passed the Statue of Liberty, that eternal symbol of freedom and justice.

Critics will always say that a cruise only scratches the surface of a destination and an itinerary such as this would not promise otherwise. But what’s wrong with that? The cosy Viking Neptune was a soothing constant over a pretty intense journey of 12 nights, five cities, three overnight stays, weather that took us from fleeces to flip-flops and a head-spinning collection of new memories. And you could argue that it achieved its purpose: we’re already planning a road trip around Nova Scotia — maybe via Montreal for that Leonard Cohen tour.
Sue Bryant was a guest of Viking, which has twelve nights’ full board on the Eastern Seaboard Explorer cruise from Montreal to New York City from £5,990pp, departing on September 12, including flights, drinks with meals, some excursions, wifi and crew tips (vikingcruises.co.uk)